First of all, three new books of interest:
- Jesper Grimstrup has written a book titled The Ant Mill: how theoretical high-energy physics descended into groupthink, tribalism, and mass production of research. There’s a lot more about the book at his substack. I’ve contributed a foreword.
Grimstrup has spent a lot of time thinking about what is going on in the fundamental theoretical physics research community, partly based on his own experiences, together with looking at some data he has gathered and analyzed (with Jarl Sidelmann, see here). Twenty years ago Lee Smolin and I drew attention to these problems, which in many ways have gotten significantly worse since then. I hope Grimstrup’s book gets some people thinking seriously about what can be done.
- Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper have a new book out, Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins. If you’re in London this week you can hear them talk about it in person.
The book covers a huge range of speculative ideas about the Big Bang, including a lot of stories based on Afshordi’s experiences as a researcher in the field. This is a subject I’ve never paid that close attention to, so I learned quite a bit from the book. It’s not a superficial overview, but fairly dense with information.
While going through all this was interesting, it did leave me reminded of why I’ve never spent much time on these topics. There’s no real role for deep mathematics and the whole business has stayed unfortunately divorced from any successful confrontation with experiment. The situation is kind of like that in particle theory and Afshordi recognizes some of the same problems Grimstrup discusses. There’s a successful standard model of cosmology, but nobody has had any success in going beyond it. One is in danger of doing something more like religion than science in a way that makes me queasy. Afshordi has a lot of discussion of this in the book, and see some slides of his from a talk here.
- A fascinating book about mathematics and thinking, Mathematica by David Bessis, is now available in paperback. For more about this, I’ll refer you to a review by Michael Harris of the original French edition.
In positive news about science funding, there’s yet another new theory center, the Max Planck-IAS-NTU Center for Particle Physics, Cosmology, and Geometry. This is the second new IAS theory center in the past month, last one was the Leinweber Forum for Theoretical and Quantum Physics at IAS.
With US federal science research funding in the process of being drastically cut, an increasingly large fraction of funding for such research will be coming from the Simons Foundation. Their 2024 report is now out, with financial information here. In 2024 they were spending about $300 million in grants (there’s also more grants from the Simons Foundation International).
